1

A tribute to M.A.K.Halliday 2

By Erich Steiner 3

Dept. of Language Science and Technology 4

Saarland University 5

Saarbrücken, Germany 6

E-Mail: E.Steiner@mx.uni-saarland.de 7

http://www.uni-saarland.de/campus/fakultaeten/fachrichtungen/fak-p/sprachwissenschaft-8

sprachtechnologie.html 9

Draft, October 2018, later published version under 10

Steiner, E., A tribute to M.A.K. Halliday. Lingua (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j. 11

lingua.2018.10.009 12

13

Abstract: 14

M.A.K. Halliday 15

The tribute below commemorates the life and work of Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday 16

by offering a brief biographical sketch, by reviewing his work in terms of key concepts and 17

methodological development, and by highlighting his perspective on the dialectical 18

relationship between theory and application, so fundamental for his approach to linguistics. 19

An attempt will finally be made to assess his contributions to linguistics and to bring out his 20

general underlying socio-cultural commitment visible in his advocacy of an “appliable 21

linguistics”. 22

1. Life and Work1 23

1.1 Biographical background 24

1 Many of the works referred to here are available in the altogether 11 volumes of collected works of Halliday, edited and made accessible by Jonathan Webster and Bloomsbury-Continuum between 2002 and 2017.

We shall restrict ourselves here to essential stages of Halliday’s life as a background to his 25

work in linguistics. Longer and more detailed biographies can be found in several places. 26

The account given below has as its main background Webster’s excellent biography of 27

Halliday (Webster. ed. 2015: 3-16), as well as my own personal conversations with Michael 28

Halliday between the mid-1980s and his passing away in April 2018. Comprehensive 29

background material is also accessible in Martin ed. 2013. 30

Halliday was born in Leeds, Yorkshire (England) on 13 April 1925 to his mother, a teacher of 31

French, and his father, a teacher of English with a profound interest in grammar and 32

literature. Halliday’s school experience involved classical texts and classical history, while 33

English literature provided the only formal contact with the language of more recent periods. 34

His own personal interests centered around China and around language. In early 1942, he 35

entered the national services’ foreign language training course (established at the advice of 36

J.R. Firth) and qualified for intensive training in Chinese. After 18 months’ training, he 37

entered the services, taught members of the army in Britain and then did a year of service in 38

India with the Chinese Intelligence Unit in Calcutta. The political background to all this was 39

Britain’s engagement in the war in Asia, especially against Japan and its occupation of large 40

parts of China. From 1945-1947, he taught Chinese to members of the army back in London. 41

These courses were organized at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where 42

he both taught others and participated in formal studies of Chinese in the Chinese 43

Department. His academic interest in linguistics thus was embedded in his experiences as a 44

teacher of Chinese. During that same time, he also studied Russian in London. When he 45

won a British Government grant for ex-servicemen to complete his higher education, he used 46

this to travel to Peking (Beijing), where he studied Chinese at Peking University, at the same 47

time teaching English to Chinese students. In June 1948, he successfully completed the 48

University of London examination on Modern Chinese (language and literature) in Nanking, 49

after which he took a job in China working for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives in the 50

remote rural north of Western China for about 4 months. He then received a scholarship from 51

England for doing 2 more years of postgraduate study of Chinese. The application for that 52

scholarship had in fact been made by Professor Eve Edwards, head of the Chinese 53

Department at SOAS, due to Halliday’s excellent results in his examinations. He pursued his 54

studies of Chinese at the University of Peking, initially focusing on historical studies and 55

Sino-Tibetan Studies, but later on with a re-adjusted focus on modern Chinese dialects in 56

Lingnan University (nowadays Sun Yat-sen University) in Canton (Guangzhou). Theoretical 57

influences during that time included Chinese linguistics, some Russian linguistics, but also 58

general linguistics from J.R. Firth, whom he somewhat later came in contact with in London. 59

These years in China were complicated politically and in terms of everyday life due to the 60

civil wars between nationalists and communists. Travel between Peking and Guangzhou 61

was difficult and dangerous, but Halliday still managed to do intensive comparative studies 62

on Mandarin vs. Cantonese Chinese and the strongly varying dialects in the Pearl River 63

Delta around Guangzhou under Professor Wang Li. In 1950, he had to go back to England to 64

complete his PhD, but was not admitted to SOAS due to his suspected sympathies for 65

communism. This was the period of McCarthyism, so he had to affiliate himself with the 66

Chinese department at Cambridge where a more liberal attitude was adopted. This affiliation 67

with Cambridge was not in itself a problem, but Cambridge at the time had classical Chinese 68

studies only, and Halliday’s intended supervisor Firth was at SOAS in London. So, his 69

supervisor Gustav Haloun, Professor of Chinese at Cambridge, suggested that Halliday work 70

on the C14 Chinese translation of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, a historical 71

Mongolian biography of Genghis Khan, the earliest known longer text in Mandarin Chinese. 72

After Haloun’s unexpected death in 1950, Halliday remained inscribed at Cambridge, yet 73

under the external supervision of J.R. Firth. His PhD-analysis of the Secret History of the 74

Mongols thus came under the methodological influence of Firthian linguistics, although 75

Halliday’s “Systemic Linguistics” published in 1961 as Categories of the Theory of Grammar 76

represented a further development beyond Firthian linguistics in some respects. During the 77

time at Cambridge, Halliday closely interacted in his work with colleagues in the Linguistics 78

Group of the British Communist Party, which provided another formative context for his 79

theoretical development. They were particularly interested in non-standard varieties (dialects, 80

spoken language, colloquial rather than formal language, everyday rather than literary, 81

minority rather than majority languages) and in modern rather than classical languages more 82

generally. At the same time, Halliday’s engagement with Communist activities was critical 83

rather than passively accepting: he certainly saw language not as a passive reflection of 84

reality, but as a semiotic reality which in turn can become a formative force in cultural and 85

social development. “Condensed into one short paragraph, our own point of departure is the 86

following: Language evolved, in the human species, in two complementary functions: 87

construing experience, and enacting social processes…” (Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 88

xi). The quality of “construing experience” certainly gives a much more active place to 89

language than we usually find in some deterministic-materialist versions of Marxism – 90

wrongly associated with Marx’s philosophy, I believe. The quality of “enacting social 91

processes” refers to the function of language to constitute and bind together social 92

formations, something clearly associated with a dialectic Marxist view on language. Halliday 93

has sometimes referred to his positon as one of “mild materialism” in personal 94

communication, which I think is a valid characterization. Halliday’s solidarity with Marxism 95

was a critical one, hence his leaving the Communist Party of Great Britain after its failure to 96

critically position itself vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Hungary in 1957 (Martin ed. 2013: 133 97

fn. 5). 98

After applying unsuccessfully for a position in Firth’s department at SOAS in 1952, he was 99

appointed as Assistant Lecturer in Chinese at Cambridge University in 1954 where he 100

submitted his PhD-thesis at the end of that year. The theoretical underpinning and extension 101

of Firthian linguistics appeared only in 1961 (Halliday 1961), without Firth having seen a final 102

version. Systemic Linguistics in this 1961 version was, while being basically Firthian, at the 103

same time more comprehensive than anything Firth had produced about the theory of 104

grammar. The development towards a comprehensive model of language continued towards 105

the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and ultimately Systemic Functional Linguistics 106

(SFL) of later years. The comprehensiveness of Halliday’s model, its emphasis on the 107

paradigmatic (systemic) axis and its specific modelling of the (meta-)functional diversification 108

of language from lexicogrammar through semantics and into context do not contradict any of 109

Firth’s basic views on language, but they are much more detailed and explicit than anything 110

Firth was able to produce at his much earlier stage of linguistic theorizing. 111

Halliday’s time at Cambridge also saw his involvement in machine translation, which 112

however remained a marginal activity for him. Much more central to the development of his 113

ideas was the idea of “register”, related to Firth’s notion of a “restricted language” and to the 114

Marxist interest in language variation and in technical registers in particular. Halliday moved 115

to the University of Edinburgh as a lecturer in general linguistics in 1958, which meant a 116

move away from the dominance of work on Chinese towards applications of linguistics to 117

English teaching. The Edinburgh environment was one in which theory and practice met in a 118

mutually enriching perspective, and it was also one in which his getting acquainted with the 119

socio-linguistic work of Basil Bernstein became a strong momentum towards further 120

development of some socio-linguistic aspects of his work. In the same context he met 121

Ruqaiya Hasan, who moved to Edinburgh in 1960, became one of Halliday’s first doctoral 122

students and later on his wife. From 1963 onwards, they both worked in the Nuffield/ Schools 123

Council Program in Linguistics and English teaching in London, with Halliday as Director of 124

the Communication Research Centre at University College London. This work, and his 125

involvement in the project into “Linguistic properties of scientific English” provided a decisive 126

context for the further development of Systemic Linguistics reflected in Halliday 1967-68, a 127

landmark publication at its time as far as a multifunctional approach to language, and as far 128

as “participant roles” and “thematic/ information structure” as linguistic concepts were 129

concerned. Halliday’s model of 1961, which was still relatively Firthian, but with an emphasis 130

on the “System” over “Structure”, began to develop into “Systemic Functional Linguistics”, 131

thus specifying a generalized multi-functional view on language in terms of ideational, 132

interpersonal and textual dimensions where earlier versions and certainly Firth’s work had 133

still been programmatic. From 1965 he became head of department of General Linguistics 134

at University College London, which he then left following a call to the University of British 135

Columbia. Yet, he was prevented from taking office by a refusal of the Canadian government 136

to grant him entry. The following period without a position in academia until late in 1971 gave 137

him time to record the material and produce a description and analysis of the language 138

development of their new born son, later published as Learning how to mean. The time 139

between 1971 and 1976 saw him (and Ruqaiya) in visiting appointments at Brown University, 140

University of Nairobi; in a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioral 141

Sciences on the UC Stanford Campus; the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle; and the 142

University of Essex. From 1976 onwards, he was Foundation Professor of Linguistics at the 143

University of Sydney until his retirement in 1987. During the 1980s he was also involved in 144

the text generation project “Penman” at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of 145

Southern California in Los Angeles, later on also with the COBUILD-project at the University 146

of Birmingham in England. For another 30 years after retirement, Michael Halliday remained 147

highly active in invited visiting positions all around the world, China in particular. There is a 148

constant stream of publications by him right until the time of his death. He passed away in 149

Sydney, close to his last home in Manly/ Sydney, on 15 April 2018, following his colleague 150

and beloved wife Ruqaiya Hasan, who had passed away on 24 June 2015. 151

Halliday was a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of other academies 152

(cf. Webster 2015. ed.: 14), as well as a recipient of numerous awards and honorary 153

doctorates around the world. 154

155

156

1.2. Key concepts and methodology 157

This section will highlight the development of key concepts and methodology in Halliday’s 158

work, while the following one will identify key working contexts for what he calls appliable 159

linguistics, particularly in his later years. This concept of appliable linguistics is of central 160

importance for an appreciation of Halliday’s work: 161

“… I am talking about a general characteristic of a theory, not its application ‘to’ this or 162

that particular issue….An appliable linguistics is a way of thinking about language: that is, its 163

immediate scope and context of application. But to be appliable to real-life situations and 164

real-life tasks, it has to be good to think with…”” (Halliday 2010:128 and 141, respectively). 165

From this general perspective on linguistic theory there follows one fundamental 166

methodological principle of his work: theory and application go hand in hand, mutually 167

influencing and guiding each other. Any sharp division between “theoretical” and “applied”, 168

as it is wide-spread in many academic settings, is detrimental to the type of linguistic theory 169

he had in mind. 170

While Halliday’s work biographically started with descriptive work on classical 171

Chinese and a few publications on varied other topics such as linguistic input to machine 172

translation and a “mechanical thesaurus”, a first programmatic and fairly comprehensive 173

formulation of his views is his 1961 Categories of the Theory of Grammar. In this widely 174

discussed paper, he outlined essential categories of his “Systemic Linguistics”, later on 175

“Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)”. Together with a few other papers in the journals 176

Linguistics and Journal of Linguistics within the following years (all usefully collected and 177

edited in Vol. 1 of Webster 2002-2017), he thus presents his model of language in an early 178

form, opening in the modest and co-operative fashion typical of Halliday (Webster ed. 2002-179

2017, Vol. 1: 37): 180

There have been in the main two approaches to description in modern linguistics: the 181

“textual” and the “non-textual or, for want of a better word, “exemplificatory”. More recently, a 182

third has been added… the “generative”. Some linguists have gone so far as to suggest that 183

transformative generation should replace other types of making statements about language. 184

Others, myself included, feel that all three approaches have a fundamental place in 185

linguistics: that they do different things, and that the third is a valuable supplement to the first 186

two. 187

He does go on to say, though, that he is not offering yet another set of guidelines for 188

language descriptions, but that part of general linguistic theory which is concerned with how 189

language works at the level of grammar. Somewhat later (p.40) he makes a statement which 190

links up surprisingly well with contemporary and current information-theory based 191

approaches: 192

Language has formal meaning and contextual meaning. Formal meaning is the 193

“information” of information theory… Contextual meaning, which is an extension of the 194

popular – and traditional linguistic – notion of meaning, is quite distinct from formal meaning 195

and has nothing whatever to do with “information”. 196

This connection of formal meaning with information theory (nowadays a core idea of 197

Distributional Semantics e.g. Boleda and Herbelot 2016) is not surprising for those who are 198

aware of the legacy left by J.R. Firth to the thinking of Halliday. However, it should also be 199

clear that Systemic, and much more so later Systemic Functional Theory, belong into the 200

family of symbol-processing based approaches and in that respect are methodologically very 201

different from the extreme “bottom-up empiricism” of information theory in some of its 202

applications to natural language (cf. Gleick 2011, Hale 2016). But it is a fundamental 203

principle of Halliday’s linguistics that it recognizes both “formal” and “contextual” meaning, 204

which between the 1960s and the early 2000s was very rare in linguistics. 205

Halliday’s “Systemic Linguistics” gradually grew into “Systemic Functional Linguistics” (SFL) 206

with “Systemic Functional Grammar” (SFG) as its grammatical core through the development 207

of several functional layers in parallel with the structural categories (units) of his 1961 208

version. Phrase Structure is mapped onto three functional layers, the “(ideational, 209

interpersonal and textual) metafunctions”. This development, as formulated in Halliday’s 210

widely-read 1967-68 “Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English” and in his 1970 “Language 211

Structure and Language Function”, was substantially further developed in the various 212

versions of his “Introduction to Functional Grammar” and in Halliday and Matthiessen 1999 213

for ideational meaning. The entire model is labelled “multifunctional”, because the functional 214

structure of language is conceived along 3 major dimensions, or functional components: 215

ideational, interpersonal and textual. These dimensions cover what in other linguistic theories 216

would be accounted for as logico-semantic, interactive and information structural dimensions, 217

to use somewhat theory-neutral terms. The basic assumption of a multifunctional analysis is 218

thus shared with other functional linguistic schools, the particular combination of functions 219

and their systematic relationship to other linguistic levels including context may be specific to 220

Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The levels/ strata of language (Phonetics, 221

Phonology, Lexicogrammar, Semantics, Context) are related through a scale of “abstraction”. 222

Other scales of abstraction (rank, delicacy and exponence) are methodological tools for 223

relating categories within levels/ strata to each other, and all of these to their instantiations. 224

“Rank” is similar to levels of projection in Chomskyan syntax, “delicacy” means different 225

degrees of specification within one level, and “exponence” means instantiation from 226

categories at each level to their instances. 227

Within this multifunctional approach, Halliday’s work on phonology usually has a strong 228

relationship to grammar and thus largely falls into what elsewhere would be called 229

“information structure”. Although there are some more strictly phonological works on English 230

and Chinese (cf. Collected works in Webster 2002-2017 Vols. 7 and 8), possibly his 231

strongest influence on phonological thinking as a whole is his modelling of the interface 232

between grammar and intonation, and here particularly in “Theme and Information 233

Distribution”, as he often called it (Halliday 1967, Halliday and Greaves 2008). His ‘Notes on 234

Transitivity and Theme in English’ 1967-68, with due acknowledgement of earlier Prague 235

School work, count among the earliest attempts in linguistics at formulating a basic 236

framework for information structure and its interface to grammar, remaining a reference point 237

for linguistic discussions for decades. 238

Halliday’s comprehensive account of Cohesion in English (together with Hasan 1976) was, 239

again, a milestone at its time and has remained a highly successful reference work since 240

then. Their treatment was one of the very first of its kind, closing a serious gap in the 241

description of English (cf. Randoph Quirk in his foreword to the book) and covering the key 242

cohesive mechanisms of reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion for 243

English. It is a textbook in the sense that it arose out of work by both authors in applications 244

to language teaching and thus does not exclusively address the linguistic research 245

community – in the light of which fact it is all the more remarkable that it has remained one of 246

the standard works on text linguistics. In Halliday’s own work, cohesion remained the non-247

structural (i.e. non-grammaticalized) resource of texture, alongside the grammaticalized 248

resources of taxis, theme and information (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: 651ff), somewhat 249

different from the version of SFL in Martin 1992, where cohesion forms a sort of backbone for 250

a discourse semantics. 251

One of the key characteristics of Halliday’s work on language is the integration of Context of 252

Culture and Context of Situation into linguistic analysis. Early programmatic formulations can 253

be found in Halliday et al 1964, referring back to his theoretical predecessors Malinowski 254

1935 and Firth 1968. More specific modelling is proposed in Halliday and Hasan 1985 and 255

more recently in Halliday and Matthiessen 2014:31-48. The analysis of contextual 256

configurations in terms of field, tenor and mode, classically in alignment with the 257

metafunctions ideational, interpersonal and textual has become a standard in much work on 258

context and “register”. These contextual configurations are very close methodologically to the 259

notion of situational characteristics of registers (Biber and Conrad 2009: 40ff), whereas 260

Halliday’s register (cf. below) is close to their linguistic characteristics of register. The 261

alignment between contextual configurations and semantic/ lexicogrammatical metafunctions 262

in Halliday is what Biber and Conrad postulate as the functional forces that explain why given 263

linguistic features tend to be associated with situational characteristics. For Halliday, context 264

is a key notion, and linking analyses of context with the language-internal levels of semantics 265

and lexiocgrammar is a key methodological step in the architecture of his SFL. 266

267

The register itself is the linguistic (semantic, and through this ultimately lexicogrammatical, 268

and phonological) expression associated with a given contextual configuration.2 Register is 269

thus functional variation in language, an area in which Halliday has inspired a rich tradition of 270

investigations into linguistic varieties (scientific writing (Halliday and Martin 1993), a whole 271

range of registers of English and occasionally other languages (e.g. Ghadessy and Halliday 272

eds. 1988 and later, Hansen-Schirra, Neumann and Steiner 2012, Neumann 2014, Kunz et 273

al 2017). Work on register in Halliday’s tradition can be closely compared to work by Biber 274

and associates, arguably with more elaborate linguistic modelling behind it, but less 275

statistical refinement in some variants. 276

277

In any account of the work of Halliday, his continuously expanded Introduction to Functional 278

Grammar (IFG) in several versions from 1985 to 2014 has to be given a central place: the 279

first two editions 1985 and 1994 have Michael Halliday as a sole author, whereas the much 280

extended versions of 2004 and 2014 give credit to Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen as a reviser. 281

The first and second editions were intended both as an introduction to Systemic Functional 282

Theory of Grammar, and as an introduction to the functional description of English. With 283

edition number 3, IFG became “…more of a reference work and less of a beginner’s book.” 284

(Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: XIV), adding a systemic (paratactic) dimension to the 285

dominant functional-structure account in editions 1-2, thus broadening its scope and using 286

2 Note that in the variant of SFL represented in Martin 1992 etc., the context itself is stratified into register and genre

substantially more corpus material for illustrations and motivations. The increased systemic 287

dimension has substantial input from Matthiessen (1995), which in turn is influenced by 288

Halliday’s earlier work (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: XIV). There is also a stronger link 289

than before between contextual variables, text-types/ registers and the textual presentation 290

of the book, and there are more extensive points of reference to non-SFL work. The 291

organizing concepts of IFG are those of the metafunctional organization of grammar, the 292

clause, its ranks, its complexing (taxis), cohesion and finally the link between grammar and 293

semantics through grammatical metaphor, another important concept of Halliday’s work. 294

From the first version 1985 onwards, IFG had a chapter on “grammatical metaphor”. The 295

term refers to what in other schools of linguistics is usually covered as the mapping of 296

semantics and grammar onto each other (cf. Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: chapters 6 and 297

10ff, Goldberg 1995, Haspelmath 2003), with grammatical alternations and nominalizations 298

provoding typical examples. Grammatical metaphor is the mapping of one semantic 299

configuration onto different grammatical constructions. Mappings which are direct/ literal are 300

called “congruent”, other mappings being “indirect/ non-literal/metaphorical”. Grammatical 301

metaphor is thus the reverse of lexical metaphor, the latter usually understood as the use of 302

some word in a non-default (though in some sense related) meaning (Halliday 1985: 320). In 303

Halliday’s work, grammatical metaphor is crucially related to ontogenetic, phylogenetic and 304

logogenetic development in language use, where, broadly speaking, metaphorical variants 305

occur later than non-metaphorical or congruent ones. It also forms a decisive link between 306

(clause-)semantics and lexicogrammmar, and it is used as a key explanatory device in 307

relating texts and discourses along the dimensions of density, directness and explicitness of 308

encoding ((Halliday and Matthiessen 2014: chapter 6 and pp.692f; Hansen-Schirra, 309

Neumann and Steiner 2012: chapters 4 and 14 for modelling translation). 310

The following examples (1)-(2) from Halliday and Matthiessen 1999: 229 illustrate 311

grammatical metaphor and the key properties just mentioned: 312

(1) The cast’s brilliant acting drew lengthy applause from the audience. 313

(2) The cast acted brilliantly, so the audience applauded for a long time. 314

Of these examples, (1) is metaphoric, (2) is congruent. (1) is denser than (2) by 315

mapping the (approximately same) ideational meaning onto fewer grammatical 316

constituents of higher ranks. (1) is less direct than (2) by mapping logico-semantic 317

meaning onto a verb phrase (drew), processes onto nouns (acting), and 318

circumstantial meaning (lengthy) onto adjectives, and their phrases, respectively. (1) 319

is, finally, less explicit than (2) because of fewer encodings of time, aspect, mood and 320

its indirect encoding of causation. 321

322

323

324

Halliday’s more general views on language and human consciousness are represented in 325

Volume 3 of his collected works thus reflecting his engagement with discourse across 326

disciplinary boundaries. One of the most comprehensive formulations can be found in his 327

1995 ‘On Language in Relation to the Evolution of Human Consciousness’, where he 328

considers the specifically human aspects of the brain, aligning his views with those of bio-329

chemist and neuro-scientist Gerald Edelman’s theory of “neural Darwinism”, and with work 330

by the socio-linguist Basil Bernstein, the linguist John Ellis, the physicist and educationist Jay 331

Lemke and computer scientist Michio Sugeno (“fuzzy computing”) in a strong anti-mentalist 332

statement. He develops global views on language as a fourth-order (semiotic) system in the 333

sense of general systems theory: observable systems in a bottom-up perspective include 334

physical, biological, social and semiotic systems, with language belonging into the fourth type 335

(Halliday 2003:2). This general view also underlies the comprehensive model of “experiential 336

and logical meaning” published in Halliday and Matthiessen 1999 Construing Experience 337

Through Meaning. A Language-based Approach to Cognition, a substantial work intended as 338

a contribution towards creating a bridge between SFL and Cognitive Linguistics, which, 339

however, was not as widely discussed outside the SFL community as it would have deserved 340

it. 341

We have attempted in section 1.2. a review of some key concepts developed by Halliday for 342

understanding language, and of the methodological principles for relating these concepts to 343

each other and to their instantiations, the data. In a global perspective, Halliday’s approach is 344

systemic in that it gives priority to the system (paradigm) rather than the structure (syntagm) 345

of linguistic units. Technically, this prioritizes (phonological, grammatical, semantic, 346

contextual) features over the units / structures in which they get realized, not unlike in 347

unification-based frameworks such as Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammars of the 1980s 348

and 90s (Pollard and Sag. 1987) or Sign-based Construction Grammars of later years (Boas 349

and Sag 2012). SFL-modelling is usually less formalized, however, than the approaches 350

mentioned here for comparison, especially as far as notions of “structure” are concerned. 351

Halliday’s approach is functional, not unlike other functional approaches to language (cf. 352

Butler 2003), in that it assumes several layers of abstract (grammatical, semantic, 353

contextual) functions language-internally, and in that it subscribes to the belief that these 354

abstract functions are the historical products of the functions language use has in a socio-355

culture. The section below will highlight some important contexts of application, out of which 356

Halliday’s concepts and methods arose, illustrating them with further influential pieces of 357

work. 358

359

360

1.3 Theory and application 361

Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics is built on the principle that theoretical 362

development should be grounded in and motivated by questions and problems arising in its 363

socio-cultural environment. This grounding and motivation must not be misunderstood as 364

deterministic constraints: methods and solutions arising out of theoretical development will 365

frequently be partial or insufficient, or they may transcend questions and problems originally 366

motivating it. This entails a sort of “dialectic” between openness of theoretical development 367

on the one hand, and Halliday’s view that linguistic theory should be “appliable” and be 368

driven by theoretically significant guiding applications on the other. “There were four main 369

strands in my own personal background whereby language came to stand out in focus of 370

attention: literature, foreign language learning and teaching, machine translation, and the 371

broad issue of undervalued languages and varieties.” (Halliday 2010:128). Halliday viewed 372

the relationship between theory and application as a dialectical one: for him application was 373

blind without theoretical foundation, just as theoretical development was sterile and in danger 374

of losing focus without relevant application. 375

Among the most obvious, immediate applications of linguistics are descriptions of languages. 376

In Halliday’s case, this initially meant descriptions of classical Mandarin Chinese (1959), but 377

also modern Chinese grammar, phonology and discourse phenomena. In subsequent 378

phases of his work, he published numerous descriptions of areas of English grammar, and 379

very prominently his initially textbook-like Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985), which 380

has since grown to a very detailed and theoretically-guided comprehensive description of 381

English (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014). We have already mentioned his work on the 382

multifunctional structure of the English clause (1966-1968), one of the first attempts of its 383

kind, but he also produced work on word order, intonation and lexis. In his descriptive work, 384

he developed his analytical methodology from the early scale-and-category-model to the 385

later multi-stratal and multifunctional model that we see in his writings already from the late 386

60s onwards. 387

Another source of theoretical development for him was the analysis of (literary and everyday) 388

texts, for example in his “Linguistic Function and Literary Style: An Inquiry into the Language 389

of William Golding’s The Inheritors”, in which he attempted to show in which sense linguistic 390

patterns can be significant for poetry or prose. Yet linguistic analyses are relevant for 391

discourse analysis in general, as he showed in his 1992 “Some lexicogrammatical features of 392

the Zero Population Growth Text”. Of particular relevance also was translation: apart from an 393

early involvement in machine translation, Halliday used human translation as a context for 394

modelling relationships between texts, such as “equivalence and variation”, but also for 395

modelling the evaluation of texts. Halliday et al 1964 (I,5) already modelled translation within 396

the then established “Systemic Linguistics”, and Halliday returned to models of translation 397

and of translation evaluation in some of his later writings (cf. Halliday 2001, 2009, 2012). 398

These text analyses had considerable influence in the communities of literary scholars, 399

discourse analysts and translators, but in their reflections back onto developments of theory 400

and method, they were important for focusing on certain areas of the linguistic system, and of 401

taking textual phenomena, such as frequencies and proportionalities of constructions, into 402

account. 403

And then there was the important area of language teaching providing a context of 404

development for his theory, both as first- and second language teaching. His highly 405

significant contributions toThe Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching (1964) have been 406

a major point of reference for language teachers and translators, but also a major early 407

source for the development of the SFL-key concept of “register”, so influential in relating 408

language variation to contexts of use. His 1990 paper Literacy and Linguistics: A Functional 409

Perspective, published in a revised version in Vol. 9 of his collected works (2007), shows his 410

influential attempt at addressing key concepts of education from a functional linguistic 411

perspective, an attempt which was highly influential in the English-speaking world and 412

engaged with the different media (spoken-written, other semiotic systems) and ideologies of 413

education. And again, this area of application was instrumental not only outwards towards 414

educational contexts, but also inwards towards developing aspects of the overall SFL-model 415

towards different modes of discourse into areas such as multimodality. 416

Related to this area, there is, of course, language development in ontogenesis: Halliday’s 417

1975 Learning how to mean was an influential work at its time, encompassing intonation, 418

lexicogrammar and semantics. It was also one of the counter-positions to the then dominant 419

nativist perspective arising out of the tradition of Chomsky and Generative Grammar, hence 420

also the preference for the term “language development” over the nativist “language 421

acquisition”. It represented one of the most detailed case studies of one individual child over 422

the period of 9 – 30 months, thus covering an earlier onset period than had been usual until 423

then. This work provided analyses charting ontogenesis in an all-encompassing perspective 424

ranging from phonetics and intonation through lexicogrammar and discourse, thus providing 425

an impetus to a host of similar studies by other researchers. 426

427

Halliday’s SFL has also engaged in some areas of computational linguistics (cf. O’Donnell 428

2017). These areas marginally included parsing but, more strongly, text generation in the 429

1980s, even if the influence mainly came through SFL-researchers other than Halliday 430

himself. What Halliday himself engaged in was machine translation and the lexicon (early in 431

the 1950s), text generation in the 1980s, corpus linguistics, quantitative studies and 432

meaning-based computing in the 1990s. Halliday’s own contributions in this area are brought 433

together in Vol. 6 of his collected works, rightfully titled “Quantitative Studies”. I believe that 434

Halliday’s own main interest in computation had to do with his deep-seated belief that 435

linguistic systems and their instantiation are related through feedback loops through 436

interactions of which the system emerges out of dynamic and cumulative frequencies in the 437

instance i.e. texts (not unlike the approaches represented in Bybee and Hopper eds. 2001 or 438

in Tomasello 2003). In this sense, his view was closer to current data-driven empirical 439

linguistics than to strictly top-down symbol-processing approaches. However, his was a 440

strong belief that human language processing happens at a symbolic level, hence his 441

“Functional Grammar” which is arguably at the core of his work and which represents a 442

strong commitment to seeing language as a semiotic system of signs. Emergence and 443

change in this system are happening in interaction with frequencies in the instance. 444

445

2. Halliday’s contributions 446

I have focused here on Halliday’s own work, exceptionally well documented in Webster (ed. 447

2002-2017), leaving aside work inspired by him all around the world. Representative 448

overviews on work in SFL are available in Hasan, Matthiessen and Webster. eds. 2005, 449

2007, in Webster ed. 2015, in Bartlett and O’Grady. eds. 2017 and in Bowcher, Fontaine and 450

Yameng Laing. eds. forthcoming, to name just a few collective volumes. The world-wide 451

International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (http://www.isfla.org/) provides an 452

international forum for cooperation in the form of annual conferences, and there are a 453

number of regional and/ or national associations in addition. There is the Halliday-Hasan 454

International Fund in China organizing various activities around SFL, and there is the 455

Halliday Centre for Intelligent Applications of Language Studies 456

(http://hallidaycentre.cityu.edu.hk/index.aspx) in Hong Kong, which has been a center for 457

research and teaching along the Systemic Functional Linguistics developed by Halliday. 458

I have tried to show in 1.2 that Halliday at various stages in his linguistic work has made 459

original and long-standing contributions to our knowledge of language and to methods for 460

researching it. He has done so across phenomena as diverse as the relationship between 461

phonology and grammar, transitivity and participant roles, cohesion and texture, the 462

language-context interface, register and linguistic variation. In 1.3. an attempt was made to 463

exemplify the deep and creative impact which Halliday’s linguistics has had on areas ranging 464

from the analysis of literature, through (foreign) language learning and teaching, (machine- 465

and human) translation, to the analysis of variation in language. In all of these respects, 466

Halliday has left significant traces which will continue to lead others on to further 467

development in theory and practice. 468

Yet to all of those who were fortunate enough to encounter him in person, Michael Halliday 469

left more, and something different, than exclusively insights into language: He was an 470

impressive personality with his full and active life of 93 years, most of which he was able to 471

enjoy fully active both in his beloved linguistics and in other activities he enjoyed, such as 472

hiking and sharing time with friends. The passing away of his beloved wife and colleague 473

Ruqaiya Hasan in 2015 was a loss which he never fully recovered from. Michael Halliday’s 474

initial fascinations in life were, according to his own testimony, language and China. He was 475

able to pursue these in the fullest sense imaginable: He spent a decisive period in 476

revolutionary China1947-1950, one of the major turning points and critical periods of world 477

history in the 20th century. Through his mastery of Chinese, he was able to experience these 478

decisive moments like very few other Westerners, and he preserved a deep interest in and a 479

critical solidarity for China for the entire rest of his life, spending many shorter and longer 480

periods in various parts of the country. As for his fascination with language, he was able to 481

pursue it both through his competence in a range of languages, and through the model of 482

language which he developed and which has motivated a great number of fellow linguists 483

around the globe towards intensive and creative work. In spite – or maybe because of - this 484

extraordinary personality, Michael Halliday was incredibly friendly, modest and supportive – a 485

gentle man. He lived openness rather than personal distance, modesty rather than vanity, 486

solidarity rather than competition – and he left a painful gap, not only in linguistics, but also in 487

the lives and memories of those who knew him. 488

489

490

491

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